This is a hard one to write because it’s about the second oldest son, who is now nearly 38 years old and still behaves as if he is 14. His pants, as was the pants of his generation of the mid-1980s, still sling too far below his butt-cheek line.

There is nothing in the world like watching a young man who wasn’t raised so far removed from his oldest and younger brothers behave in a totally different manner than the way in which he was raised, and then swear he wasn’t raised at all.

Why would he feel that way?

Because at some point along the way, this is the one who decided “dat life” was more glamorous than this one, and that there was nothing to life or living except how much money you could get and how fast you could get it, by any means necessary.

Forget what Mama said, for some reason that appears to be a fluke of nature, he made a qualified decision to become what [D. White Mann] wanted him to be, rather than to become the true success he could have been as I cautioned him on many a day. He was born roughly talented and he chose not to flow with it for reasons I can’t explain to this day. I dare not ask what those reasons were at the time, and at this point, there is no longer a reason for me to know it.

He likely doesn’t have a clue why he made the decisions he did that nearly cost him his life, but if I can draw a strict parallel, my own decisions nearly cost me my life, and I never did a wrong thing ever, and definitely nothing close to what he did wrong.

He grew up in an age where “acting white” meant getting an education, speaking proper American English, and wearing a suit & tie when it was really the other way around.

To “act white,” as I explained to him and to his brothers, was actually actively engaging and indulging in drugs, alcohol, erratic and ungodly behaviors, listening to “crap” music inspired by the white supremacist hatred of Black people, and being engulfed in lascivious violence and wanton murder and criminal imprisonment for no reason other than the claim that there was nothing ELSE to do. Of course, there was plenty ELSE to do, but he chose not to.

Then this truth comes out:

The United States of America was founded on whitenized ideas that involve mass murder and criminal behaviors and the degradation and denigration of women and Black persons and persons of color. As long as it was, and still is profitable; and as long as women and Black people/colorful people are comfortable with the adverse subjugation of their skin and female lives, it will continue on as it is now and always was.

This is a nation that demands accountability from others, but takes no accountability for its own sins. I bear witness to the day when I finally had to admit that my most wayward child had no obligation to admit his own wrongs in a nation that would not admit theirs. All he truly did was mimic the behaviors of America’s founding fathers, extremely self-righteous in their many endeavors to destroy the lives of others in order to gain what they desired most for themselves. He did that. The Golden Rule: Do unto others as others will ultimately do unto you.

In the meantime…

As a recovering co-dependent of people with addictive and abusive behaviors, such as those of my son and others like him that are both white and Black, I discovered that those who indulge in drunken, drug-addicted and whore-mongering behaviors do tend to spin whirlwinds and tornadoes and even hurricanes in circles around themselves.

Drama, drama, and more drama–everlasting bullshit and drama – the stuff that is responsible for one dumb ass spin-off reality show after another; just for the “Voyeur in You.”

The kind of living that burns America to the ground in its attempt to normalize sin and call what is right evil and what is evil right, this “Twistedness” is the America that abides in addictive and selfish behaviors. It conjures itself in illified social manners like those of a wannabe president like the kind of Donald Trump and his followers.

The crude and the brute and unlearned and unsophisticated and boorish is now acutely embedded as normalized behavior in America and our children either become it or become its victim or both.

Anti-social behavior has become normalized because we Americans, and those amongst us who call ourselves “christians,” have elevated addicts and their decrepit actions to star status; then we celebrate it as the ‘new normal’ when it obviously is not.

Just when addicts of all kinds need to be put in their proper position in society, we make it worse by daring to step into their abnormal pathways in order to try and rescue or ‘save’ them from themselves. This is what gave us a despot, a demagogue and a fascist headed to the Oval Office in January of 2017. Instead of being able to help them, most of us “rescuers” end up getting sucked up into their constant whirlpools and broken into about a million tiny pieces on the way out.

The “people addict,” or co-dependent, then has no clue whatsoever how it happened, except that they were trying too hard to love on someone who did not love themselves enough not to become an addict in the first place.

The two phases of co-dependency, or people addiction, are that you become either (a) an Enabler; or (b) a Target.

The Enabler

Enablers tremble in the presence of these addicts and whatever it is they are addicted to – be it strong drink, drugs, laziness, lasciviousness, or even demented sex or whatever else have you. There is nothing demented to them, only when it comes to “think you are perfect” you.

Enablers are so in the habit of cowering in the presence of the addict’s ‘storm’ that they don’t even know when they crossed it over. They have no boundaries because they don’t know there are any. I did not know there were boundaries, I was born to addicts.

And unlike those who come into the whirlwind from the outside, those who are born into it can’t identify the threshold or borderlines because they have nothing to measure it against. One psychologist put it this way, “You are so accustomed to the abuse that you don’t know there is a life out here where people don’t abuse others.”

And truly, I had not a clue that there was such a thing as men that didn’t hit women, or men who didn’t think every female they came across at any age should be rubbed and touched in places they had no right to be or fucked just because they had a hole to stick it in. Like a pussy-grabbing President, women who subject themselves to these sex addict men have wretchedly low self-esteem.

I did not know that there was such a thing as people who didn’t get drunk or high every weekend, or that there was such a thing as families who prayed together, loved each other without faking it up, ate breakfast and dinner together, talked to each other in other languages that were not curse words or crude put-downs and slights, or slept in pajamas when they went to bed at night; or even that there were families who went on trips or had gatherings meant to seal close bonds rather than break them.

I thought stuff like that was strictly confined to TV shows like “The Brady Bunch.” My family was more like the Evans Family from Good Times without the father or the family unity or the love or compassion.

This son and my others will tell you that they don’t know much about their maternal family. They wouldn’t because neither did I. I had nothing to introduce them to, because they weren’t there during my own childhood–not on a regular basis that would impact my personal life as an adult woman. That side of my life, that side of their mother’s family, of MY mother’s family, was already busted up and torn asunder before I was born. I could not fix for them what I did not break to begin with.

But at one time, I really thought I could. I attempted to pick up those million tiny pieces and every time I did, someone, somehow, some way would slap them right back out of my little desperate family-loving hands.

So I became an enabler by apologizing for their abuses in the hopes that good would come of my sacrifices. It never occurred to me that if they ever believed in a “Jesus,” he had made the ultimate sacrifice and nothing that I could do or say was going to top that.

In my own co-dependencies on addicts and abusers, I was raising children with a mind that was admittedly slanted toward taking whatever sorry ass trifling low-down man that came my way. That was to include their own father.

I lived in a translucent surreal world where, by the age of 12, I was taught to believe I wasn’t good for much of anything – not even a good and loving man. And I believed it, too. Why wouldn’t I? I didn’t see any proof that it was not true. Even women like Melania Trump have no boundaries when it comes to abusive and addicted men. What she married is more than indicative of her own self-worth based on sex and money, and marriage that is nothing more than legalized whoredom. Read “The Color of Law” by UK writer Mark Gimenez. He got it down pat.

I was surrounded with sorry men, and there was nothing else there to look at or look up to, with one exception: That “make-believe world” called the A.M.E. church where everyone in it came from upstanding, outstanding, historically and proudly-connected Black families, except us. I’m not sure if our grandmother dragged us there for her own neighborhood prestige, or because she thought there might be something there that would change the future for us.

The guilt I bear alone was that neither this son nor his brothers were a product of love between two parents, let alone two well-adjusted parents from upstanding families.

They came into the world exactly as I did — the product of a maligned, abused and not very well-adjusted Black woman.

With my own maternal instincts very much intact, as any normal woman’s would be, all that was said to me was “A PIECE of a man is better than no man at all.” They never took into account that maybe I was not a “piece” of a woman, and I had no upbringing that would have persuaded me otherwise.

I had to figure that out for myself, and I did. Way too late.

The good news for Son Number Two on this third piece, is that after all his troubles and trials and travails in life, including his “supposed to be a welfare statistic” mother who turned out not to be, he is finally progressing along as I had to progress: One day at a time, SWEET LORD & SAVIOR.

His arguments with me have evolved from “Hell, if you had not given me life, you would have had one,” to “Hell, I try.” That’s progress.

You’d have to know him to know how much progress that is. To that I say, “Hell, too. Better late than never.”

He spent a long time trying to make me feel guilty for bringing him into the world, and for a long time I beat myself incessantly about it. Lost a lot of sleep over the many times I agonized about abortion and then guilted myself to death over not going through with it, and why it is I was never allotted the ‘luck of the draw’ when it came to being married and being a mother.

When he finally confessed that he feared becoming his father, and that it was the main reason he acted the way he did … it hit me that it was this very fear that was making him become an exact image of his father. Rather than learn to be himself, as his brothers had; he feared being like his father.

It is said that the thing you fear, or dread, the most is EXACTLY what will overtake you the fastest and kill you dead if you do not gain control of it and learn to master those fears.

Do NOT run from your fears, it only makes them pursue you even harder.

The Target: i.e., Nobody’s Perfect. Except me.

If you do not enable the behaviors of addicts, you become the Target.

If you do not get caught in their sanctimonious bullshit Drama Storms, they often consider that you think the world revolves around you. “It’s all about you, isn’t it?” when they are throwing one of their freakish addict tantrums.

One former female friend of mine who lives in California was such an artist at her drunken performances that I watched even her little pet dogs cower in her presence. Her animals were caught up in her shitstorms like anyone else who came arond her, and they would tremble on approach … probably hoping that their pet fur would somehow make the tension go down.
Her own children winked away and winced at her drunken fits, because she would open her mouth and say things that they knew she only said when she was lit up like a Christmas tree. Things that were easily forgotten the next day in a morning beer-hazed fog meant to chase away the alcohol and weed-induced shitfit of the night before.

You know you are not the Center of the Universe, but they think YOU think you are the center of the universe. In their minds, you are every bit of what they exist for–to be the center of the universe.

I used to have an issue with what others thought of me, and I strove hard to prove that I was no better than them by pretending I was as “evil” as they were. I acted as if I had done all of these evil things that I had never done just to appease them. However, shortly after my 50th birthday, it dawned on me that I was, in fact, better than them.

Yes, it IS ALL about me. If not me, who? Certainly it could never be all about YOU, not in the center of MY life.

After listening to them talk about one horrid activity after another that they had engaged in in their youthful endeavors to get all the sex, all the drugs, all the money, all the carelessness that life could throw at them, I knew that I was rendered by God into absolute perfection. I had never done any of those things and that made me perfect. When they were partying, I was in church — WITH my children. Beat the danged Pastor to the door and stand in the cold waiting for him to unlock the sanctuary.

Yes, perfect people make mistakes, they just don’t do things intended to harm others in the process. All of my efforts went toward saving my sons from MY grief and despair, even when it meant stepping out of the picture so they didn’t have to be victimized by the same folks who victimized me. What my sons did after that, I had no control over.

I had not done drugs, I had not become an alcoholic, I had not cheated on a husband, nor cheated with anyone else’s husband; I had had had no lesbian affairs, had not committed any crimes, had chosen not to engage in whoredom and sex parties just for fun; and I was guilty of nothing more than loving others more than I loved myself. People addict is my only sin, and it cost me and no one BUT me. Dearly, it did.

I discovered that making bad choices did not make me imperfect, they made me human. What made me imperfect was seeking to harm others just because I had been harmed. I kept allowing ‘those’ types to cross boundaries with me and come into my life unabated, where they did not belong.

In trying so hard not to be perfect or viewed as perfect, I had become absolutely Perfected in Christ without even knowing it had happened.

I was the Excellent Woman of Proverbs 31 and no man will ever get the benefit of my beauty, for the market on that is permanently closed. However, I had become the Proverbs 31 Virtuous Woman that I looked for in other women and always ended up disappointed by those I admired the most.

The bad things that happened to me didn’t happen because of MY choices, they happened because of the fact that I had not learned to accept myself for exactly who I am.

I was simply not hard-wired to be an evil or selfish person just because I could, and I finally had to look in the mirror and stop running from my own self. The Savior and Son of God was always confident about Who and Whose He was, and He did not shirk or run from it or pretend it was not so.

His words “Be ye perfect as I am Perfect” were fulfilled within me. It was not impossible to be Perfect, or ‘Perfected in Christ’, it was entirely possible and feasible.

CHOOSE YE THIS DAY WHOM YE SHALL SERVE, but as for me and MY house…

This is why, when I sought the Lord God as to why I would be treated so badly after having done nothing wrong to the ones who treated me the worst, even my own children … I asked Him the ultimate question “Why me Lord?” I had heard “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but I had been done consistently wrong by the same folks I had never harmed. Those whom I did good unto returned evil to me. That still has not changed, but my perspective on it has.

His only answer to my prayer was a question: “Why Me?” I got the point instantly. So should you.

So I am grateful, as a single Black mother, that I tried to fill in the gaps of my sons’ absentee and unloving and uncaring father, who came into my life only because I was taught to think so little of myself that I allowed him.

Redemption is EXPEDIENT.

As scarce as positive Black males were, I enrolled my boys into programs like Big Brothers, PALS, and any church mentoring program that I could find; and then I prayed that they would find something else besides their own father to look up to. Better men, better fathers, better lovers, Black men of upward demeanor, thirsty for the redemption and excellence and everlasting perfection of the peace of God.

I do thank the Lord for those few Black men who did pass by my way that stood in the gap left by my sons’ father.

They were the ones who stepped aside from their own busy schedules to teach my sons a few lessons about life that only a real Black man could have taught them. These Black men-not-their-father handled some particular things with my boys that I could not handle alone and taught them some things that I could not. There were a few good Black men who stood in the gap without trying to stand between my legs, and for that I am appreciative.

Though I had seen few decent men in my own life and was a product of a mother who thought so little of me that she tried to turn me into what they wanted instead of trying to encourage me to become what I wanted in life, I was not without hope that maybe the good brothas had made a lasting impact somewhere along the way so that the vicious cycle would not be continued on their watch.

“Hope is a bird with optimistic perception that perches up on the brink of each moment,” so I have not given up on them yet; and I never will.

Maybe I’ll still be here when the truth finally comes shining through and marching on, but just in case I’m not — I finally made a command decision for myself:

My decision to give him LIFE and not to abort when I was encouraged to on all sides will NOT be blamed or held at fault for his own personal decision and accountability NOT to LIVE the perfected life that he was given by me.

“For no one in this world can slip beyond the reaches of the long arm of the Lord.”

Stay Tuned for Part IV of IV …